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Foreign Policy Update

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m in favour of war with Iraq, simply because I didn’t see any other politically possible way of stopping the humanitarian disaster of our current blockade of Iraq. But obviously, war is not something we should go into lightly, and the current offer from Saddam to allow the inspectors back in has to be taken seriously by anyone with the best interests of humanity at heart. If the UN inspectors can go in, and if they can get any way along the way toward certifying compliance with the resolutions, then there might be a political solution to the problem, allowing an end to our horrendously cruel blockade in a manner which saves face, doesn’t require a whole load of military casualties and, importantly, doesn’t put me at risk of sucking in an anthrax spore put in my breakfast cereal either by Saddam, or by some local nutter wanting to put the blame on him.

So, I propose that we abandon the war debate for the meantime and all throw our support behind the proposal that there should be a short hiatus in our war preparations. For the peace side; hey, jaw-jaw is better than war-war. For the War Party; hey we’re only proposing a short break, during which time we can start tightening domestic security. It doesn’t have to be a long hiatus; not even two months. I’m proposing that we should continue negotiations on UN inspections for precisely seven weeks, starting today, and if there isn’t material progress, we send the troops in on November 6th.